Back when we designed our current layout, we made the executive decision to seperate user comments from the news stories. Although we here at Late Night...er...PGC want our site to have a strong user community, we felt a fully-integrated talkback on our site would be too much of a distraction. I know I don't like seeing "MAN thaz sukz I hat u s0ny xbox rulz" at the bottom of an otherwise professional story. If memory serves me correctly, GameSpot used to have such a feature, but they tore it down--probably for the same reason.
That being said, I haven't found the reader responses on the same page to be very distracting. I guess we just have better forum members! Perhaps I'll push for a reevaluation of such a "Recently Heard" feature in the future...